Girl Holding Her Foot, 1985 is one of six etchings from Lucian Freud’s celebrated suite of large-scale intaglio works, four of which were executed on imposing copper plates measuring almost seventy by fifty-five centimeters each. A quintessential example of one of Freud’s famous ‘naked portraits’, Girl Holding Her Foot offers a refreshingly raw approach to the venerable genre of the classical Nude.

Freud, particularly in his etched works, depicted his sitters with a palpable weight and physicality. The negation of spatial context, props and background in many of the artist’s printed works of the 1980s, particularly Girl Holding her Foot, Blond Girl and Woman Sleeping, create a strange, almost surreal effect in which the sitter appears to float in a void, hovering in a way that directly contradicts the strong, weight-bearing contours of their bodies.

The anonymous sitter of Girl Holding Her Foot also appears in a painting of the same name, in which the setting of this scene is more clearly defined. The girl was seated in the corner of Freud’s first floor studio in Notting Hill, naked on the quilted couch that appeared in many portraits of the same time, notably Night Portrait, 1980 – 1985 which would form the basis of the 1985 etching Blond Girl. Freud was first and foremost a portrait painter and with a remarkably post-modern mentality, he approached this genre in an almost performative way. Operating under strict confidentiality, Freud would only select his sitters from a closely-knit circle of friends and acquaintances. He invited them to sit under his scrutinizing gaze in his studio for hours on end, over many months, rewarding them afterwards with extravagant roast dinners.

The extended period of time needed to create these portraits, both painted and etched, allowed the artist to conjure a deep rapport with the sitter. Through this process, his portraits are suffused with hard-won candor, unconstrained by setting, naturalistic or otherwise. Using this privileged interaction with his sitters as a foundation for his portraits, Freud was able to manipulate conventional codes of decorum – creating extraordinarily powerful and visually disarming works.